The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.
In many areas of the world, programs often do not end on the half hour or hour. For example, a program could end at 7:10 pm instead of 7:00 pm as indicated in an electronic program guide. Paddings may be added around the actual showings of media programs by operators in their scheduling information. This can cause overlaps between previously scheduled adjacent media programs and fast depletion of tuners that can be used for recording the adjacent media programs.
In the U.S., similar problems exist with broadcast programs because the broadcast programs can run over their published end times and thus may cause overlaps with previously scheduled media programs. Tuner depletion as described above can also occur.